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Saturday, April 26, 2014

The Atacama Part I

I have been to a lot of incredible places and had many
unforgettable experiences on this South American Adventure of mine, but all
great things must come to an end and the end of my trip has finally come. But
not before one last big adventure.

Mountain Carie will argue this point, having had probably
the most moving experience of my life while out trekking at the end of the world in November and, in February, having fallen madly, desperately,
incurably, heartbreakingly in love with Antarctica, but Science Carie thinks
that I saved the best adventure for last.

I spent three weeks in the Atacama Desert. The Atacama
Desert. THE Desert of deserts. A desert stretching 100,000-130,000 km2 (depending on how it's defined), about the size of the entire state of Virginia, across northern Chile, Argentina, and southern Peru.

Marsscape in the Atacama

Sandwiched
between the glittering beaches of the Pacific Ocean and some of the tallest,
baddest mountains on the planet. Long considered the driest place on Earth (the ice-free McMurdo Dry Valleys of Antarctica are actually the driest, but I’m sort of reluctant
to count anything in Antarctica as being on Earth). There are places in the
Atacama where rain has never been
recorded. And it’s been a desert for millions of years. The Atacama is
peppered with active volcanoes, spewing geysers, immense salt flats, bizzare
shallow lakes—some of the most extreme environments imaginable. It’s Mother
Earth’s badass, mean, absolutely non-nurturing,
stab-you-in-the-eye-socket-and-steal-your-lunch-money side.

It’s an astrobiologist's dream come true. It’s Mars on
Earth.

It’s a place this geobiologist has dreamed of visiting ever
since I first read a paper about how, although the soil in the direst parts of
the Atacama are essentially sterile (unlike everywhere else on Earth) since
life needs water and water is absent, there are cyanobacteria partying it up while
buried inside salt crust fortresses which, because salt draws water, provides
just the teeny amount of moisture sucked from the extremely low humidity in the
air that lets life eek out an existence. Life living inside a salt crust.
Because it’s more hospitable than the outside world. That, my friends, is
badass.

Microbes chillin' in salt crust because, whatever, they like it there.

Getting there

Although technically I first entered the Atacama desert a
month earlier en route to Peru, and was in her again while puking in the air
over Nazca, I consider the start of this adventure to have been when I got off
of a flight from Lima in the sketchy Peruvian border town of Tacna.

I had been dreading this part of my journey. Peru had me on
edge ever since my welcome mugging in Lima. Up until Lima, I had led a largely
charmed travel life, my experience reminding me that people everywhere are kindand nice and enjoy making human connections and are mostly to be trusted. That
strangers are friends you haven’t met yet. My experiences with strangers in
Peru were largely quite different. There were wonderful exceptions where I
interacted with truly lovely, warm, interesting, good-hearted people. And I
recognize that there are tragic reasons that things are the way they are in
Peru. And I know my whole perception of the country and its people was soured
by that first hour in Lima. But interacting with Peruvians felt like
interacting with a bunch of ravenous thieves who would happily slit your throat
in order to empty the contents of your pockets. It was stressful.

View from my hostel room in Lima

I still want to go back someday and give Peru a second
chance, see more of some of the incredible landscapes there, eat more of the
amazing food, and hopefully have more interactions with the Good People who I’m
sure also inhabit the country. But this time a few weeks was enough. Being in
Peru had me sleeping with one eye open and walking around with my hand on mypocket knife and it wore me out. So when I read warnings about how Tacna was a
den of thieves and drug smugglers and that travelers should be on their guard
at all times, I took the warnings seriously. And I wasn't thrilled that my
travel plans for the day required:

Getting a taxi from my hostel in a sketchy
neighborhood in Lima (and horror stories about Lima taxi drivers abound) to the
airport.

A flight from Lima to Arequipa to Tacna (at
least, I hoped, the flight would be reasonably safe? hopefully my neighbor
isn't going to pick my pockets if I fall asleep?).

Getting a taxi (but don’t trust taxi drivers,
who are liable to kidnap you) from the Tacna airport to the international bus
terminal (a den of thieves, drug dealers, and other miscreants) on the other
side of town.

Finding a “collectivo” (= car full of strangers,
hopefully ones who aren't thieves, drug-dealers, rapists, or others willing to
slit your throat for a buck) ride across the Peruvian/Chilean border (entry
point for narcotics smuggling, potentially dangerous), hopefully to the bus
terminal in Arica, Chile.

At the Arica bus terminal (bus terminals being,
again, dens of thieves and drug dealers, with border-town bus terminals being
the worst of the worst), hopefully getting a ticket for the overnight bus to
San Pedro de Atacama, if not, I’d have to find a place to spend the night in
Arica (and where?).

If successful, entertaining myself in Arica, hopefully
without getting mugged, until my 10pm bus departure (hanging around bus
terminals late at night? Not safe).

Walking to my hostel, which does not show up on
any maps and which I may or may not have a reservation for, in a town with no
street names or addresses.

And as if all that wasn't enough, I woke up that morning
running a high fever, with a splitting headache, horrible body aches, and a
sinus cavity completely filled with mucus. I prayed for everything to please,
please please please, go smoothly, and help me survive the next 26 hours,
ideally with my luggage and virtue intact.

Miraculously, smoothly is exactly how everything went. My Lima
hostel arranged a driver to the airport for me, and the pre-arranged price was
fair and when he dropped me off he didn't demand anything extra (unlike how it
works with every other taxi driver in the history of Peru). Check-in was
painless. My closest neighbor on the flight was another young female tourist
from Italy who was blissfully non-talkative, and we had a full empty seat
between us. I was able to get a credential-carrying airport-licensed taxi
driver to the Tacna bus terminal, again at a reasonable price, and he was
friendly and gave me tips for how not to get taken advantage of at the bus
terminal.

The Tacna bus terminal was a confusing shitshow and as soon
as I arrived I was mobbed by hawkers of collectivo rides, all of whom seemed
equally desperate and aggressive and sketchy, and was literally pulled around
the terminal to pay various fines and fees that seemed questionable at best but
I had no idea what the hell was going on. I ended up herded against my will and
better judgment into a car with a rotund, handsy, and particularly aggressive
Chilean driver.

Please, sir, I just want to go to San Pedro.

But it all worked out. He was completely crazy, but fun
crazy. The nice older Chilean couple I was sandwiched between during the hour
and a half ride across the border cracked jokes with me about how crazy the
driver was while he loudly belted out one cheesy Peruvian love song after
another between stops when he’d roll his window down and try to convince female
pedestrians to come over and kiss him. The absolutely incredible part of these
scenes was that they worked! Baldness, advanced age, and a shape approaching
spherical must be to Chilean and Peruvian women what height, a rock-hard set of
abs, and a shiny new Porsche is to women in the U.S.

Once safely delivered to the bus terminal in Arica, Chile
(which, I’ll add, looked remarkably unshaken by the magnitude 8.2 earthquake
that had hit Northern Chile just two weeks prior), I made a beeline for the Tur-Bus window
to see about the availability of overnight bus tickets to San Pedro. I was in
luck: there was one seat left, a window seat, which is what I always prefer.
And there was a special deal going on so I got the seat for significantly less
than the normal price.

Ticket in hand, I dropped my giant backpack off at luggage
storage, walked across the street to a seedy but acceptable restaurant to get
an early dinner. The way people smiled warmly at me when they walked into the
restaurant made all of the stress I had been carrying start to melt off. I was
back in Chile. Where people are nice to gringas. I managed to offend the
hostess at the restaurant by not eating everything—I tried to explain that I
was sick and my appetite was tiny, that the food was very good but I just
couldn't eat all of it—but that is an unacceptable excuse in Chile. I had
forgotten, back in Chile also meant needing to bring an appetite. But I think
she forgave me by the time I left.

Back in the Arica bus station, it was every bit as sketchy
as I had feared and I witnessed at least two drug deals, but my luggage was
safely in storage and I had my bus ticket in hand. I sat down on a flight of
stairs with my head in my hands and waited the final hours before my bus. I
collected my bags at the last minute, hopped on the bus, and of all the
miracles that day this was the best: my seatmate didn't show up. I had the row
of seats to myself. Oh, blissful luxury! I sprawled out across the two seats
and conked out. Slept like a champ the whole way to San Pedro.

I was gently woken up by a neighbor who alerted me that we
were getting close, and wasn't it a pretty view! Then, once in San Pedro, a nice local
woman offered to walk me the mile to the hostel, since it was close to her
house. And when I arrived, the hostel hostess, who was sitting out in the dusty
yard, greeted me by name. She had been expecting me. Apparently the reservation
had gone through; she had just not had the internet connection to respond to my
emails. I had a single room, set back away from the street toward the end of
the long motel-like row of rooms set off of a dusty central yard strung with
hammocks and buzzing with lazy flies. My little room, with mud brick walls
painted white (except for one wall painted an oddly fitting shade of pastel
orange), a rattan roof, linoleum floor, and a door that swam in its loose
frame, a beat-up dresser missing a drawer, a ratty little nightstand, nails
stuck as coat hooks into the cracks between the mud bricks, and a tiny little
twin bed piled with a dozen thin blankets, all to myself. Relief washed over me
like the rain the town was thirsty for. Finally, I could rest.

God bless Chile.

Cat, shredding the crap out of a pigeon it caught right outside my hostel room in San Pedro.

San Pedro de Atacama

Since I arrived with a fever and other trappings of the flu,
I spent the first several days in San Pedro de Atacama resting, which consisted
of sleeping anywhere from 9-12 hours, lying in bed doing python (the
programming language) tutorials (yay! fun!), watching whatever TV or movies the
ultra-slow internet connection at the hostel could manage to download, and
occasionally walking the 10 minutes into town to get some food. I have so
rarely rested on this trip that it felt glorious.

But I soon got antsy. I was in the Atacama desert after all, a place I had been dying to go for many
years, and I was not content to sit in my hostel room and be a vegetable. So
even though I was still a bit sick (but on the up and up!), I woke up one
morning, made a PLAN (I am OCD about making PLANS), and then spent hours
wandering around town trying to find the best deals for various activities.

My first order of business: the Tatio Geyser Field. This
involved waking up at 3:45 am to catch a 4:00 am bus, which actually meant that
I was so worried I was going to miss the bus (since, my phone having been
stolen, I no longer had my normal alarm clock and was relying on my laptop to
wake me which always makes me nervous) that I got up at 3 am and proceeded to
wait for the bus until 4:50 am when it finally showed up. I am decidedly not a
morning person, and require a minimum of 8 hours of sleep for full mental
function (9 being closer to ideal), so needless to say I was a zombie:
brain-dead, exceedingly grumpy, and hungry (but not for brains, having now
actually tried brain, I consider it not a breakfast dish). I attempted to sleep
during the hour and a half bus ride, and failed, but quickly started to wake up
once we arrived and offloaded (and got some coffee and food in me) and I saw…

MICROBIAL MATS!! Wheeeeee!!!!

Me petting a nice, green, gooey, thermophilic mat.

Colorful thermophiles! <3

Not to mention the geysers spewing boiling arsenic-laden
water everywhere. Unlike Yellowstone National Park (one of my favorite places
on Earth, for many reasons), there were no boardwalks and eagle-eyed park
rangers keeping people from crawling all over the geysers and dunking their
hands in them (incredibly, nobody in our group fell through the crust and was
boiled as tourist soup…something that unsurprisingly occasionally happens at
Tatio), which meant that I got to pet all
the microbial mats I wanted. I went from grumpy zombie to bubbly five year
old within five minutes of arriving at what was essentially Disneyland for
astrobiologists.

Once the sun rose (did I mention it was freezing? It was
literally freezing. Cool to see the boiling water exit the geysers, flow
downstream a bit, then freeze) and everyone snapped their tourist shots, I was
reluctantly dragged away, but only because the guide promised me that if I liked
bacteria, I’d love our next stop.

Beautiful steaming Tatio at sunrise

The Tatio geyserfield

Our next stop was a hot spring, full of things like brightly
colored carotenoid-rich thermophiles and massive ropy streamers of greenish
brown somethings and gooey slimy walls covered in, among other things,
brilliant green cyanobacteria. And we got to swim in it. I had died and gone to heaven.

Swimming with the thermophiles

Colorful thermophilic phototrophs

The guide literally had to drag me away after that. Probably
for the best, since my pale self wasn't holding up too well to the sun. The sun
in the Atacama, especially at high altitudes like where we were (over 4300
meters = 14,100 feet) is no ordinary sun. The Atacama has been compared to the
surface of the Earth prior to the development of an ozone layer 2.2 billion
years ago due to the ultra-high UV flux that fries the Atacama because of its
high latitude, extremely high altitude, and lack of cloud cover. Standing
around in the high Atacama is like standing under a UV sterilizing lamp (not
quite, but close…). Don’t tell my dermatologist I’m here, please.

I was exhausted from all of the day's excitement, but it was Easter, and I got talked into attending the Easter Saturday Night service (didn't know that was a thing) at San Pedro's historic church. Considering that I was raised in a Protestant family I have been to quite a few Catholic services in my life, but interestingly none of them in my native language, and this was no exception. The church was beautiful with its white adobe exterior and cactus wood ceiling, but the service was an exercise in endurance, beginning with a bonfire-side prayer at 10pm and going until shortly before 1am following lots of sitting-standing-sitting-standing, badly-sung hymns, a half-assed and rambling sermon, and the parading around of a shockingly campy plastic Overenthusiastic (considering he had just become zombified following his being nailed to a cross) Jesus. I thought the whole redeeming feature of Catholicism was their masterful pomp and ceremony and perfectly executed music, and this was a sort of disaster. It struck me how utterly non-spiritual the experience was for me when I've had so many beautiful spiritual experiences on this trip--all of them while outdoors and not around a crowd of halfheartedly worshiping humans. I thanked God when the whole thing was over and I could walk back to the hostel and sleep.

San Pedro's church

My next adventure was to go sandboarding. A group of about
20 of us met outside the office in town at 4pm, were handed boards, boots, and
a bar of wax, and driven out to the sand dunes in the Valle de Muerte (Death
Valley…and it looked quite a bit like California’s Death Valley). The handful
of us who said yes to whether or not we had experience snowboarding in powder
before were set loose without lessons to go hike the dunes, strap our boards
on, and hit the sand. Having watched everyone who tried it quickly faceplant as
I was first hiking up I expected to have a rough first few runs before getting
the hang of it, but, except for having to wax the crap out of the board before
every 10 second run, was very much like boarding in really wet, heavy snow. I
quickly scoped out the one jump-like object on the dune, a big rock with a
conveniently-placed sand ramp, and spent the rest of our time there amusing
myself with that. After the first time I hit it, a guy approached me on my hike
back up the dune and after complimenting me on my mad sandboarding skills,
introduced himself as a mountain guide and asked if I wanted to go get wine with him after he
got back from his next volcano trip he was just leaving on. I perked up at
“volcano trip”. The next guide asked me out to dinner. I was holding out for
volcano trip.

Me, sandboarding.

Video of the whole group put together by the agency that took us out.
I'm in there at 3:04, 4:46, and 8:54.

Volcano trip didn't end up materializing (sorry dudes, no
volcano, no date), but I did get to see more cool stuff. My next excursion,
after a few more days of troubleshooting python, was a trip out to a series of
hypersaline ponds (lagunas) in the Salar de Atacama, the large evaporitic basin
rimmed by mountains at the edge of which San Pedro sits. The lagunas are fed in part by groundwater, in
part by the little rain that sometimes falls in this, the driest non-polar
desert. Although the swimming was fun (higher salt content than the Great Salt
Lake, so even more floaty), the real highlight was scoping out some of the
microbial mats and colonized gypsum crusts around the lagunas. One, Laguna
Tebenquiche, had stromatolite-like gypsum domes colonized on the interior by a
rainbow of photosynthetic organisms in the textbook orange-green-purple
spectral stratification sequence. Living in salt, using it as a safe home in
this terribly arid, high-radiation environment. As someone passionately in love
with phototrophic bacteria and fascinated by extremophiles, it was the most
beautiful thing Science Carie had ever seen. Another place where the guides had
to drag me from the scene.

I later found the one paper that has been published
on the endoliths I saw. Strangely, they claim to have found Bacteriochlorophyll
e in the gypsum domes, which are only produced by the brown-colored green
sulfur bacteria (my favorites), but green sulfur bacteria did not show up in
their DNA sequences. Suspicious.

Desert crawler used to get to the Lagunas

Selfies on the Salar

Endoliths!!!! :-D Yay!

That night I went out to see the Atacama's legendary night skies on a tour with a Canadian astronomer who also had access to a bunch of nice telescopes that were pointed at Mars (if I squinted I could sort of imagine I could see the polar ice cap), Saturn with its rings, Jupiter with its layers and moons, and some star areas of interest. It was awesome.

Telescope.

My final Atacama excursion was sort of my spiritual goodbye
to South America. I filled my backpack with water, some food, and my camping
equipment, and wandered out into the desert. I had spent some time looking at
Google Earth and talking to locals about the area and decided on where I wanted
to go. My trip was cut short by a Calama-bound taxi driver who picked me up
just as I was leaving town and gave me a free ride to where my planned path
left the main road heading west a few miles out. He was really nice, and after
he dropped me off I felt pleased that at least my Spanish had progressed enough
in the eight months of travel that I could now have real conversations with the
people I hitched rides with.

I surfed down a steep sand dune to get down from the plateau
we had driven up to the desert floor below. At the bottom, the ground was a
salt crust, and it made crunching sounds as I walked that reminded me of
walking on ice-sheeted snow crusts, the sort of “whoompf” that makes my stomach
auto-drop because it hails avalance conditions. Except instead of snow, which
reforms over the course of seasons, this was rock, and while the occasional
scant rain in the area no doubt re-dissolves and moves the salt around a bit
each year, I realized that my footprints were not footprints in snow that would
be gone with the next melt, and stepped carefully.

Salt. Salt salt salt.

Volcano and gypsum crusts.

I wound my way around a salty riverbed that crunched underfoot. The going was much easier than I had expected, so I was moving way too fast for my plan, which meant that I would soon enter the protected Valle de la Luna in which I knew I was not allowed to camp, so I turned 90 degrees and headed into the labyrinth of ravines that makes up the Cordillera de la Sal, spending the next hour picking my way slowly upward. Eventually I arrived at the top of the Cordillera and, walking along a ridgeline, found the perfect spot with a view of the Valle de la Luna and the two other Cordilleras. It was exposed to the wind, but the views were unbeatable. So I set up camp, which meant I laid my tent out on the ground as a tarp with my leaky sleeping mat (post-repair attempt #20) on top of it and my big fluffy sleeping bag on top of that, since chance of rain was exactly zero.

I snapped a bunch of photos and read a bit while watching the sun go slowly down. I got hungry, and pulled my dinner supplies out of my backpack, and that's when I noticed that my stove was missing from my mess kit. Given that dinner was supposed to consist of spaghetti and soup and all I had was dry noodles and powdered soup, no stove meant no dinner. Luckily I had brought lunch for two days, so I made myself an avocado sandwich and munched on half of a bell pepper while I wondered where my stove could possibly have run off to (I later found it in a grocery bag back at the hostel). The sun set behind the cliff that marked one end of the Valle de la Luna, and I curled up in my sleeping bag to watch the stars come up.

Sunset, as viewed from my Spot.

My spot.

But long before stars, it was the wind that came up: first a breeze and then a howl. I decided to move camp to a calmer spot out of the wind, and quickly before twilight gave way to the black of a moonless night in the desert. I found a spot down the hill a bit tucked into a shallow gully. The gully was narrower than my sleeping mat, so after laying down the tent again as a protective tarp over the sharp crystalline edges of gypsum that made up the gully's walls, I folded in my leaky mat and burrowed myself with sleeping bag into a sort of camping taco.It was surprisingly comfortable, but I couldn't sleep.

The high altitude, cloudless skies, and remoteness made for quite a night sky show. First came Jupiter and Saturn and Mars accompanied by a handful of other bright stars. Then, as the sky faded from gold to purple to black, I was able to spot Orion, the Southern Cross, the stars of the Zodiac, and then the Milky Way and Magellanic Clouds. The moon was below the horizon, but the sky seemed almost bright for starlight. I watched satellites race each other across the sky, saw several shooting stars, watched as Scorpio crawled its way slowly up from the horizon as Orion chased Leo below it. When I looked directly overhead such that the dark masses that marked the cliffs that were my home for the night disappeared, I could imagine that I was floating in space, spinning slowly as I watched the stars punctuating the blackness of the universe.

Stars starting to appear at twilight.

Our planet is quite a spaceship, and we are lucky to have it as it zooms at 67,000 miles per hour in circles around the giant, glowing nuclear fusion reactor that powers the machinery needed to maintain the activities of the spacefaring organisms that it houses. Our spaceship, the reactor it orbits, and unknown hundreds of thousands of other spaceships that range in size from too small for a human to ride (but fine for a microbe) to over 300 times the size of ours, are, in turn, zooming around in a massive collection of other power plants, many of which have attendant spacecraft as well, some of which may or may not have passengers we would recognize as living. We are all together as a group racing other groups of varying configurations and sizes outward, ever outward, from the heart of our universe where all matter began.

As someone who grew up wanting to be an astronaut (a dream that grew out of my elementary school dream of wanting to be a "scientific engineer at NASA," whatever that means but which, young Carie would be amazed and proud to know, is pretty damned close to what I actually am now), the thought struck me that getting into a little metal capsule to spin like a flea around the stunningly beautiful and brilliantly comfortable life-supporting spaceship that I'm already traveling on wasn't so much more exciting than what I'm already doing.

But wonder gave way to philosophical terror as it always does when I look too long at the stars and think too hard about how I am just a tiny and transient sack of water only 0.00021% as old as the universe. That as precious and amazing as this life I have is, it will be over soon, long before I have seen even a significant fraction of my own spaceship, let alone understood it, let alone seen, experienced, or understood the rest of our vast, vast, and mysterious universe. That everything I value and experience and want and am is only a flash of electrons being transferred among atoms in a particular configuration that allowed me, for a brief and wonderful moment, to exist. And that I, and everyone and everything I know and value except the universe itself, will cease to exist. According to the belief system I was raised in that's all okay because I posses an immortal soul that, when I die, will float up to some alternate existence that it supposedly came from, having grown in empathy and wisdom or at least amused itself for a time during its brief adventure on Earth.